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to our weekly Book Review at BookBravo.com! Here you will find reviews
on books of various subjects, from cookbooks to novels, new releases
to old favorites. Enjoy and please let
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not accept recommendations of books for review. Our reviewers decide
what to review at their sole discretion. One of them being an author
himself, he is very sympathetic toward other authors. But he and other
reviewers reserve the right to review the books they personally have
chosen to read, for their own pleasure and edification.

I
found Philip K. Dick through the movies – Blade
Runner, based on his novel, Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? happens to be my
second favorite science fiction movie of all time. (My most
favorite sci-fi flick, for what it’s worth, is Stanley
Kubrick’s 2001.)
Because of Blade
Runner, I always thought I’d give Dick a try
sometime, but managed to put it off – alas, there are
many books to read, and so little time. Then I saw Steven
Spielberg’s Minority
Report, a mediocre movie for my taste, not in the
same category as Blade
Runner and 2001,
but the story itself is intriguing, a future society where
crimes are discovered before they happen. I was wondering
where Spielberg got his clever idea when the titles rolled
at the end and I saw the screenplay was based on a Philip
K. Dick short story. Two times could be no accident; I decided
to go to the source and see what this author was all about.

Philip
K. Dick, who lived from 1928 to 1982, mostly in California,
wrote 36 novels, many with odd titles, and 5 short story collections,
winning the Hugo Award in 1962 for The
Man in the High Castle. I decided to start with Flow
My Tears, The Policeman Said, which won the John W.
Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of 1974. Set in the
futuristic year of 1988, fourteen years beyond the book’s
publishing date, Dick imagined a world of incredible technology:
3-D television, cars that fly, and other gee-whiz gadgets
that have not come to pass. Like other science fiction writers
of his era, Dick got the future at least partially wrong;
technology has progressed more slowly than the optimism of
the mid-20th century believed. Yet this does not interfere
with the enjoyment of reading such a tale, and there are other
human truths to consider more interesting than flying cars...
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